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star trek - Why are Vulcan lips Human-reddish instead of green?


We know that Vulcan blood is copper based instead of iron as in Humans, making it appear green instead of red. This is shown when bruised or bleeding as well as in Bones' insults to Spock.



The lips of (especially Caucasian) Humans are red(dish) because the blood shines through the skin. Consequently, Vulcan lips should be green:


Spock with green lips


Is there a decent explanation why this is not the case, both In-Universe as well as Out-Of-Universe? This would be a terribly cheap thing to do, while making Nimoy look even more alien than the ears and eyebrows alone. The fact that Spock's blood is green was established very early in the series if I remember correctly, so it is safe to assume they planned it all along.



Answer



As the link you provide indicates, caucasian-equivalent Vulcans have not only green blood, they have green skin. (In a caucasian, most of the skin colouration is from the blood, this is why sick caucasian people tend to become so pale as their blood withdraws from their skin.)


Thus I would expect that while they may have wanted to colour the lips and skin green, it was not feasible in the budgets of the time to do more than just colour the lips. The combination of pink with green is aesthetically unpleasing to many people, so they probably decided to avoid combining pink skin with green lips, and accept it as a limitation.


Over time, people have gotten used to the skin tone of Vulcans as portrayed in the series, and as such it would be economically infeasible to use modern technology to provide the correct skin tone and lip colour.


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